Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

No, really! The fish was thiiiis big!

Saturn owners who have been waiting for a shooter and fans of seafood: your ship has come in. Darius Gaiden will fulfill both of those desires.

Darius is a side scrolling shooter of the classic style. In fact, at its core, its exactly like the very first side-scrolling shooter, Scramble. Your ship fires forward and drops bombs that arc downwards. This game goes much further than Scramble, however.

One of the best features is the extreme number of power-ups. There are four power levels for each weapon system. After you pick up a fifth power-up, you switch to an even more powerful weapon system, which has four power levels... and so on... Same with your bombs.

There are multiple paths to the end of the game. After you finish each level, you are presented with a choice of two levels to try next. You need to complete seven levels to finish the game, but there are a total of 28 different levels to play. You can take many different paths to reach your goal. There are even multiple endings depending on which path you take. Some paths are much harder than others

But what does this have to do with fish? (I can just hear you asking.) Well Darius Gaiden has plenty of fish for all! All of the bosses are some sort of giant sea-creature. Many of the enemies are some sort of fish also. Most of the fish are at least partially robotic.

Darius Gaiden doesn't seem like much to begin with, but it grows on you. Multiple paths help to keep it from getting boring and the variety of enemies and weapons help also. In the end you may end up playing Darius Gaiden much more than many games you thought were better.

Why giant robotic fish? Why is it called Darius Gaiden? Those are good questions, grasshopper.